Gnosticism is an esoteric religious movement which has flourished in the first centuries AD. It offers a truly unique view on existence, and blends theology, mysticism and cosmology. Divine wisdom, human redemption, and cosmic error - these are the foremost...
Ancient Romans reportedly ingested the brains of a bream called the dreamfish to get high, and modern scholarly studies have confirmed the toxicity and hallucination-inducing qualities of the Sarpa salpa bream. Hallucinogenic fish live in the Mediterranean Sea, near the...
A Bronze Age sword, ritually bent before being deposited as an offering, has been unearthed in Værebro Ådal by a metal detectorist on his first outing. Described as “a very rare find”, an entire hoard with several objects dated to...
“Jesus is God.” An inscription declaring this to be a reality, the earliest and oldest written expression of the Christian faith, has been deemed 'the greatest discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls' by at least one religious scholar. Dated to...
It has widely been accepted that climate (in the form of the Late Little Ice Age or LLIA and the Justinianic Plague were the primary culprits of empirical change, causing a massive dwindling of the population, driving Rome to its...
One of the most remarkable ancient musical instruments ever discovered is the so-called Aztec death whistle. Newly published research seems to confirm the correctness of the ‘death whistle’ label, as it turns out these whistles create sounds that would be...
The wheel, one of humanity’s most transformative inventions, remains shrouded in mystery. Historians agree it revolutionized transportation and labor efficiency, yet no one knows exactly when or where it was invented. New research published in Royal Society Open Science by...
With the help of declassified images collected by United States spy satellites, a team of researchers from Durham University in the United Kingdom and the University of al-Qadisiyyah in Iraq have identified the site of one of the most important...
The Thracians worshiped Ares, the god of war, Sabazios, the sky father god, and had faith in the Sun, son of the goddess Bendis, the incarnation of perfection and immortality. The most popular cults were the Dionysian mysteries, which surely...
It was more than four decades ago that archaeologists first unearthed the remains of the large Roman villa complex at Hechingen-Stein in southwestern Germany. Yet as excavations have continued at this site for the past three decades, more and more...
